Firearms, opioids add dangerous elements to spring break

In the 2022 version of “Where the Boys Are,” the boys are slinging fentanyl and packing heat.

This past weekend in Panama City Beach, another of the Florida beach towns coping with hordes of beersoaked, spring breakers gone wild, police busted 161 young people, which might sound ho-hum to folks in Fort Lauderdale who remember the 1980s, when police patrolling the city’s teeming beachfront carted hundreds of young miscreants to jail.

But when Panama City Beach Police Beach Police Chief JR Talamantez announced the arrests last Sunday, he added something that made it plain this wasn’t your daddy’s spring break. Talamantez said that his police officers seized 75 guns over two days. A haul, he told reporters, that “could arm a small army. Semiautomatic weapons, long rifles — these are weapons brought to a resort destination. These are weapons brought to a beach.”

Shots had been fired. A bullet wounded a 21-year-old visitor. A flash mob trashed and looted the local Walmart. Beachfront merchants shuttered their shops as if a hurricane was looming.

The previous weekend in Miami Beach, where civic leaders might prefer Russian invaders over the spring breakers who’ve overrun Ocean Drive, gunslingers defiled the bacchanalia. Mayor Dan Gelber, writing for the Miami Herald, described a city struggling to keep order. “Last weekend, five innocent tourists visiting Miami Beach on spring break were shot on consecutive nights by criminals with semi-automatic weapons,” he wrote.

Fort Lauderdale’s spring break woes were of the fentanyl kind. Last month, six young partiers, including four cadets on break from the U.S. Military Academy, were hospitalized after overdosing on fentanyl-laced cocaine at a Wilton Manors vacation rental. The Sun Sentinel reported that 28 other drug overdose cases were treated in Broward County that day, followed by another 27 on the following day.

Rowdy, of course, has long been a characteristic of spring break. The first New Years Eve I spent in Fort Lauderdale, as 1975 gave way to 1976, Fort Lauderdale Police sent a military surplus armored car (dubbed “the Monster”) rolling down A1A to break up what an overexuberant writer might have described as a riot. But even when the spring break invasion peaked with 350,000 students in 1985, most of the transgressions were nonviolent drinking offenses.

It was tawdriness, not violence, that offended local civic leaders, bothered that their city was internationally renowned as the wet T-shirt capital of the free world. Too many party animals had been jammed on the barrier island and the aesthetics were appalling. In 1986, Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Ron Cochran described a beachfront beset by “absolute squalor. Your feet stuck to the pavement because of the urine, puke and beer. Just heaps of garbage in a tropical setting.”

Sick of it all, City Hall killed spring break. Inhospitable ordinances were enacted. Nighttime parking along the beachfront was outlawed. Tow trucks stalked A1A like vultures. Hundreds of kids were tossed in jail for minor infractions. Spring breakers came to regard Lauderdale as a town where cops played rough. And gradually, shabby dive hotels were replaced by towering luxury brands that would appeal to a richer, more sophisticated, less-apt-to-vomit-in-the-street class of tourists. (Though lately, beachfront hoteliers worry that a new wave of raucous spring breakers, undaunted by $800-a-night room rates, are partying like it was 1985.)

The Daytona Beach News-Journal this week recalled when that city took its turn hosting the collegiate pilgrimage. “At its height, an estimated half-million breakers descended on the beachside, gridlocking the streets, getting drunk and disorderly on the sidewalks and falling off hotel balconies. Daytona Beach, after congratulating itself on stealing the event from Fort Lauderdale, found that it could not handle the crowds.”

Now Panama City and Miami Beach, like Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach, have decided that the economic benefits, as Gelber put it, aren’t “worth the chaos.” He said, “We don’t ask for it, promote it or encourage it. We just endure it.”

Which echoes sentiments voiced in Fort Lauderdale in the late 1980s. Except, according to police in Miami Beach and Panama City, many of those joining the 2022 college break have never been inside a college classroom. Too many are locals, come to hawk drugs of questionable provenience. And too many of the interlopers come armed. That checks out, given that national gun sales were less than a million a year back when the kids deluged Fort Lauderdale. In 2020, according to the FBI, Americans bought more than 39 million firearms.

Maybe this isn’t the same spring break because, with more privately owned guns than people and with 91,000 fatal drug overdoses a year — most from synthetic opioids that didn’t exist in 1985 — this isn’t the same America.